End of Expansion Jewelcrafting

There comes a time between the end of the last batch of content, and the release of the new expansion, when raw gem prices and cut gem prices are near equal.

There is no profit left in Jewelcrafting rare (blue) and uncommon (green) gems.

Epic gems can still turn a profit of 100-300g on a good day, depending on when you buy and sell. However it’s becoming a bit of a gamble.

Don’t worry, I’ve been through all this before and I can tell you what to do.

How to sell gems even when they don’t make a profit in the Auction House

Jewelcrafting Profit Problems

1. Buy gems raw, unless you have plenty of time to waste prospecting the ore. I don’t.

2. Keep a small stack of 1-4 of each uncut rare gem in your bag.

3. Advertise in trade chat as a craftsman

4. [Jewelcrafting] LFW Your mats + 10g

5. You can change that 10g to “tip” or make it higher or lower according to demand. Buyers like a nice round number.

6. Meet the guy on a common place, e.g. in front of the Auction House.

This is how I used to make gold, when Jewelcrafting was first introduced, and the numbers available on the auction house were very low.

You can make more gold if you buy the ore and prospect it, or if you go and get the gold yourself. But as my time is very limited recently, just buy gems raw!

About the Author

The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.

On magtheridon eu, even in their heyday blue gems profit never went above 200g, and that was when they hit their peak of needability.

I remember the only way to make money with professions at the time was either alchemy( due to truegolds and flasks) blacksmithing, due to people needing a leg up into raids, and a tiny bit engineering, due to scopes, wich seems to be the triad of beggining expansion professions

Dont sell your green or blue quality gems. There’s a market to be made off of Monk rerolls. Most are going to be RAF-ing and hitting 80 and hitting Cata content, which means things like agi-based necklaces and rings will sell well, Carnelians can be made into Carnelian Spines which are perfect starter weapons and blue-quality gems become Perforators which is an ideal upgrade at 83. I’ve been selling them like hotcakes on my realm.

Thanks Arcadia,
I think you’re right, there will be a small market for 80-85 monks. We have so many sellers of these gems on my home servers, compared to possible monk buyers, that I had discounted monks from the equation.

However, Arcadia is right, there is a little market here, and if no one else is in this market, you can make a profit.

I’ve still been turning a bit of a profit with the epic gems. I make at least 2-400g profit on them if I buy the raw mats. They move a bit slower now since we are so far into the expansion pack. I’ve seen a few people say that prospecting is not worth it, but on my server it definitely is. I pretty much get 1 Inferno Ruby per stack of ore. Stacks of ore sell for about 30-40g a stack and Inferno Rubies sell for 125-150g. I definitely still make a nice profit on those. I’m excited for Pandaria though. I want to start raking in the big bucks again.

I make profit on only purple gems because raw are relatively cheap they cost between 15g (if you are lucky) up to 50g is my max on raw gem. At times not many have these cut so sometimes buying a 50g gem and selling a cut gem for 275g is a 225g of pure profit without even leaving the Auction House

I Must say – I love this site! I stumbled across your webpage just three weeks ago with only 500g in my bags… and now I’m sitting on 76k! Back to the topic at hand though, ore on my server with the announcement is 18g/stack. I usually only buy 20 stacks and do the shuffle and deal out the results (Still trying to absorb your other techniques!).

What I have found that may be worth noting to other small time players is although we may not have vast resources and supplies stocked, we’re also not nearly at risk of the market volatility as someone who is stockpiled. By keeping my overhead low and buying more frequently, I’m able limit my market side risk and adjust my prices to reflect market value rather than worry about making enough profit to pay for the resources used to craft.

If the difference in value between buying the raw ore and prospecting, and buying the raw gems directly isn’t worth the time to prospect… you shouldn’t prospect. Ever.

The only reason to prospect is that the time it takes to prospect is worth as much gold per hour or more than your other gold making activities. This is as true now as it ever was when you could vendor uncut / cut gems as a profit.

Of course, with resources like the contortium key sender, how much time you consider you actually spend prospecting can change dramatically (you still have to get ore off the AH, and get it out of the mail).

Perhaps a better way of expressing it might be to consider how much of a value add prospecting the ore is on your server. It may not be worth your time to prospect, and more efficient to buy the raw gems directly.

So i have a question no one on my server ever wants the amberjewels, ocean saphires, demonseye, dream emeralds,or ember topaz. Would it be better to sell them to a vendor before the xpac or save them and see if someone might possibly buy them after the release?? Thank you for your help!!!

@Tasha I recently had the same problem on my server where the Amberj’s and Dream Sapph’s were just not selling for me. Then I mentioned it to my husband who also has a JC’s and he was all “OMG I sell so many of those” I thought wtf, then after speaking to a couple other JC’s it turned out that it was not that these lesser gems were not selling on my server, but that they were merely not selling for ME only. So it’s always possible that it’s just not yours that are selling on the server and not that people are not buying at all. 🙂

I turned mine into the vicious stuff, which does not sell in large amounts on my server but it is a small and steady seller on the weekends.There are some days I am the only one doing this and my server is very small so I stick to only posting 1-3 at a time and just replenishing as needed.

My last check on the three servers I’m on showed that the small server was very volatile, with occasional big gains to be made, but also possibility of never selling a gem at all.

The largest server the profit is 0-20g per rare gem, and minus the time of cutting them (opportunity cost) and minus the AH fees, its not worth it. Although there are occasional big possible gains in the epic gem market.

The medium server I’m seeing the same situation as on my larger server, except one or two weeks behind. Some profits still to be made in the meta gem market.

I really think this is your server. I’m on an extremely low pop pvp server and still make 2-4k with competition. I think it’s also important to point out it may be more advisable for some people to forgo selling face to face. Face to face sales have always been known to be less efficient than dealing on the Auction House. For me it’s more time efficient to either buy what I can or farm ore and then grind out gems over 30 min. This allows me to condense all of my time into one hour block each week for farming and grinding gems. Which means I only have to log in for a couple of minutes, throw everything on the Auction House and then go about my day.

I was asked on twitter
(www.twitter.com/thegoldqueen)
why do steps one and two if you’re going to do 3-6.

The answer is that not every buyer has all his brains intact and will think that you can magically provide mats, even when you have told them to bring their own mats. They think that leatherworkers are the same as skinners, and alchemists the same as herbalists, and that if you are advertising for work then mats will magically rain from the sky for them. So having a few of each raw gem ready to hand will win you brownie points from your buyers with under-average IQ.